The story of YouTube

YouTube is a video sharing platform that doesn’t need any introduction. 10 billion views a month: numbers which speak for itself. YouTube proved that ithas a monopoly as far as video sharing platforms is concerned.

It is a subsidiary website with more than 1 billion users who watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube and generate billions of views. After getting addicted, one should also know the history of YouTube and howitbecame world’s most popular and advanced video watching platform.

YouTube is in internet industry that’s engaged in Video HostingService with its headquarters in San Bruno, California, U.S. and serves around the globe. YouTube came into existence with the hard work of 3 former PayPal early employees Steve Chan, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. Chan and Karim studied Computer Science together at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Hurley completed his design at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

According to the story that is often repeated in the media, Hurley and Chen developed the idea during early months of 2005 when Hurley and Chen met at the dinner party and faced difficulty in sharing videos while Karim disagrees with this and said that the inspiration of YouTube came from an incident when he was unable to find some video clips of 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami disaster. The thing lead to the idea of YouTube.

YouTubewas originated as a venture technology startup, with the primary investment of $11.5 million by Sequoia Capital. From 2005-2006 YouTube worked independently, but in October 2006, Google announced that it had acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion. The deal was finalized on November 13, 2006 and till now Google is the parent company of YouTube.

In March 31 2010, YouTube began free streaming of certain content including 60 cricket matches of Indian Premier League. With that,YouTube also launched a new interface of their website to ensure the user-friendly interface for the users so that they can spend more time on their site. In May 2010,YouTube was hosting more than 2 billion videos a day.

In October 2010, Hurley left the post of head of the company for Salar Kamangar. He stepped down as a chief executive officer of YouTube to take an advisory role. Chad Hurley is still managing the same role, and the current CEO of YouTube is Susan Wojcicki.

YouTube also launched an app for children i.e. YouTube kids, which enables parents to manage and filter the video content for their kids. This app is available on both, iOS and Androidplatforms. Most modern smartphones are capable of accessing YouTube videos, either within an app or via official website.

On June 19, 2007 Eric Schmidt (Google CEO), went to Paris and launched new localization system. The interface of website, are available in local languages of 79 countries and a worldwide version. These languages mostly includes English, Indian (all Indian languages right from Hindi Urdu, Gujarati, Kannada to Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Marathi, and Malayalam), French, Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, and so on. The YouTube interface suggests the choice of the local version with the help of an IP address.

There are also some countries which have blocked YouTube for some of their reasons. The list includesIran, UAE, Morocco, Thailand, Turkey, Iraq, Pakistan, Brazil, and Victoria (Australia). Apart from this, China and India also once banned YouTube but the site is active now.